Encounter Group td-56 Page 6

  "Everybody run," Amanda Bull yelled, her voice shocked. And she and the FOES group all ran as a deep humming grew in pitch; at the same time the lights all over the object dimmed in inverse ratio to the humming.

  Under his fingers, Remo felt the vibrations intensify. He decided to back off until he found what the humming was, but as he ran, the humming seemed to follow him. Or something did, because his skin became hot. There was a warmth under his clothes, which turned into a burning sensation, especially in the places where his clothes were tight, in the backs of the knees, down the back, and even in his feet.

  While he was running he glanced back. The UFO floated into the sky and, its lights extinguished, vanished past the treetops. At the same time the sound of the FOES van leaving the scene rapidly came to his ears.

  Only when they were both gone did the burning stop. But Remo had already collapsed. And he couldn't explain why.

  ?Chapter Six

  The first time the telephone rang, the Master of Sinanju ignored it. He was engrossed in his beautiful dramas. Not that Chiun would have deigned answer the insistent ringing even if he were not already occupied. The Master of Sinanju was not a servant. He did not answer telephones, which invariably rang because some inconsiderate and unimportant fat white person wished to speak with Remo and was too lazy to write a letter or appear in person, which were the only proper ways to communicate with someone. Usually the calls were from Emperor Smith, which made no difference to Chiun. Just because the Master of Sinanju treated Smith like an emperor, it did not mean that Chiun liked Smith or took his calls. Just his gold.

  The second time the phone rang, there were commercials coming over the Betamax, and Chiun quickly went to the phone, knowing that he had exactly 180 seconds to handle the interruption.

  At first, Chiun was merely going to crush the receiver into dust, which he knew from past experience would permanently silence the device. But this usually caused Remo to complain, except when Remo was unhappy with Smith, in which case Remo might crush the phone himself. In deference to his pupil, Chiun caught a loop of phone wire and, with an upward swipe of a single long-nailed finger, neatly severed the cord. If Remo complained later, Chiun would point to the cut cord as an excellent example of the art of the Killing Nail, which would probably silence Remo.

  The Master of Sinanju returned to the Betamax just in time to catch the climax of "As the Planet Revolves" and Julie's shocking admission of her kleptomania.

  Five minutes later, the Betamax stopped dead.

  Chiun's wispy beard and hair trembled slightly, and his hazel eyes turned to slits. This had never before happened. Had the stupid machine broken? It was a gift from Smith and therefore the handiwork of whites, and subject to difficulties as all white things were. Chiun got up to examine the device.

  There was a knock at the door. A timid knock. Then a small voice called through the panel, "Mr. Yung Man? Sorry about the electricity. I was told that I should give you a message from your son. He said to cut the electricity first because you never answered the phone and might be watching television, in which case you'd never hear me knock because of your hearing problem..."

  "Go away, idiot," Chiun called. "You have the wrong person. You are speaking to the Master of Sinanju, who can hear a blade of grass grow outside his window. Begone."

  "But your son, Remo, asked me to give you a message."

  The startled hotel manager suddenly found himself staring into a wrinkled face where he could have sworn a closed veneer door had stood only a second before. There was a door, then there was no door, just the old Oriental in the silk bathrobe. But no sound or motion of the opening of the door.

  "Where is my son?" demanded the old Oriental. "What message does he send?"

  "He— he's sick. He's at a phone booth next to a Burger Triumph stand on the main highway leading to Chickasha, just south of here. He said you should come right away."

  "Begone and call me a taxi car. I will be down shortly. And I will expect my machine to be working again when I return."

  * * *

  The cabby had had stranger fares before— he thought. First there was this old Chinese character who came flying out of the hotel and as he bounded into the back seat, cried, "My son is ill, and you will take me to him instantly. I will pay you well for your speed."

  "Okay, feller. Where is he?" He got the cab rolling.

  "He is at a telephone, beside a place where they cook those disgusting meat things you creatures are always consuming."

  "Say what?" asked the driver, who wondered what he'd landed by way of a fare.

  "A burger thing."

  "Oh, Burger Triumph. But which one? There's millions of 'em around these parts."

  "The one on the road leading to Chickentown, due south."

  "Chick— oh, Chickasha! That's good enough. We'll find him."

  They found Remo seated with his back to a telephone booth. In front of him stood a huge roadside rubbish can overflowing with Burger Triumph wrappers, paper cups, and half-eaten cheeseburgers.

  "Aiiee." The Master of Sinanju screamed when the cab pulled up to the booth and he beheld Remo semiconscious amid the litter.

  Remo looked up with glazed eyes. Oddly, the glassiness made them look more alive than usual. He had seen so much death that it was as if his eyes had absorbed it.

  "Little Father..." Remo mumbled. "I tried to get you by phone..."

  "Never mind," Chiun snapped, looking from Remo to the overstuffed barrel. "You have outdone yourself this time, Remo."

  "What's up? What's the matter with him?" the cabby asked.

  "He has slipped back into utter degradation," Chiun said.

  "Yeah, I can see that. Booze?"

  "Worse."

  "Worse?"

  "Yes, he has gorged himself on filth. Forgetful of his heritage, he has reverted to whiteness."

  "He does look kind of pale at that. If he's your son, that's pretty bad."

  "He is not my son. He is a filthy white meat-eater who has violated centuries of tradition. And for what? For hamburgers. Remo, you must have eaten over a hundred hamburgers." Chiun's strident voice lapsed into puzzled plaintiveness. "Why, Remo? I thought you had passed that disgusting phase." Truthfully, this behavior made no sense. As part of his Sinanju training, Remo had long ago given up beef, and an unfortunate incident years ago in which he had almost died from eating a hamburger his metabolism was unable to accept cured him of any relapses to his pre-Sinanju days. In fact, Remo should be dead now, if those hamburger wrappings were any indication of his most recent meal.

  "I am waiting for an explanation, Remo," Chiun said sternly.

  "Not burgers," Remo mumbled thickly. "Arms and legs. Look."

  "What?" Chiun asked.

  "He said look at his arms and legs," the cabby said helpfully.

  "I know what he said, white. Return to your car."

  Chiun bent down and rolled back one of Remo's pants legs and saw the redness of the skin, which contrasted to the paleness of Remo's bare arms and face and made him resemble a comic-book Indian.

  "These are burns, Remo."

  "Right. Burns. Whole body burned."

  "Your arms are not burned. Nor is your face." Chiun examined Remo's other leg. The skin was seared. Not deeply, but thoroughly— although in some places the redness was lighter. The hairs on Remo's legs were not singed, which was strange. Remo's chest was burned also.

  Examining Remo's arms, Chiun found that the upper biceps were seared, but only those parts above the short sleeves of his T-shirt. Below, the skin was unaffected. The burns might have been abnormally severe sunburns, except that the exposed parts of Remo's body, which logically would be the ones to experience sunburn, were normal. It was just the opposite.

  Chiun, who had lived more than 80 years and had confronted nothing he could not understand, felt something like a chill run along his spine.

  "How were you burned, Remo?" the Master of Sinanju said urgently. "What did this to you?"

>   "Lights. Pretty lights. Shiny. Burns."

  Then Remo's head fell forward as he collapsed. Chiun scooped him up into his arms as if Remo were a baby.

  "Quickly," Chiun called back to the driver. "We must get him back to the hotel."

  "Let me give you a hand, old timer," the driver started to say, but before he could move, the old Oriental straightened up with Remo held tenderly in his arms, and carried him back to the cab without any effort at all.

  "I'm not gonna ask how you did that," the cabby said into the rearview mirror as he drove back to Oklahoma City.

  "And I am not going to tell you," Chiun said as he ministered to Remo in the back seat.

  * * *

  "I don't understand what it is you are saying, Chiun," Dr. Harold W. Smith was saying through the new telephone Chiun had demanded be installed in his apartment "because some lunatic had ruined the old one."

  "Then I will say it again," Chiun said across the scrambled line. "I found my son Remo burned as if by the sun. He is unconscious and cannot tell me what befell him."

  "You called me because Remo has a sunburn?" demanded Smith with ill-disguised incredulity.

  "No, I called you because Remo does not have a sunburn. He does not get sunburned, but if he did, I could deal with it. This sunburn-which-is-not is something new. Something I do not understand. He has one of those education burns."

  "Education burns?" Smith, in his office overlooking Long Island Sound, hastily gulped two Alka-Seltzer tablets and water. Sometimes he longed for the old days in the CIA without Remo's flip attitude and without Chiun's language barrier.

  "Yes, education burns. I have read of them. When a person is burned, the severity of those burns determines his education," repeated Chiun, who sometimes longed to be back in Sinanju, without Remo's lack of responsibility or Emperor Smith's inability to communicate in his own language.

  "Oh," said Smith. "You mean as in first-, second-, or third-degree burns."

  "Yes. Remo has the least of these. To an ordinary person, this would merely be an inconvenience, but Remo's essence is developed beyond ordinariness. He is now insensible."

  "Will he recover?" demanded Smith, who knew that if something should happen to Remo, something serious, he would have to order Remo liquidated and then dissolve CURE, finally ending his own life. Chiun, who did not understand that exposure of CURE would be an admission that America did not work and therefore did not understand CURE, would quietly return to his village after he had killed Remo— which would be his task under those circumstances.

  "Thanks to my healing skills, he will recover. I will make him recover whether he wishes to or not. Now he sleeps like a child— the child that he is."

  Smith suppressed a relieved sigh. "That is good. How soon will that be? He is in the middle of an assignment."

  "I know this," Chiun said abruptly. "What I do not know is what he met with which burned the skin beneath his clothes and which did not burn exposed flesh. This you must tell me."

  "Wait one moment. You say his skin is burned. But not as it would be by sunburn, but instead exactly the opposite?"

  "Yes. Opposite of reality."

  "Just a minute," Smith said, as he pressed a concealed button on his desk and a hidden desktop computer console rose up. Smith keyed a description of the scientific phenomenon into the files of the computer's memory banks, and then punched in the circumstances Chiun had explained to him. The screen went blank, and the cursor raced across the screen like a spider, leaving behind the greenish words that were the answer Smith needed.

  "I have it," Smith said. "Ultrasonics."

  "Speak English," Chiun snapped.

  "I said Remo was affected by ultrasonics. Sound pitched to a degree higher than human ears can perceive. This has been worked out to some degree in laboratories and in practical experiments. Focused ultrasonics have the property of creating heat between interfacing surfaces but don't affect surfaces not in contact with other surfaces. It fits exactly. Remo obviously entered an ultrasound field, which caused intense heat between his skin and clothes, enough to create an effect like a severe sunburn. Exposed skin wasn't affected unless it touched something else."

  "Where would Remo have encountered this ultrasonic?"

  "I don't know. It must have something to do with his assignment."

  "You told me his assignment had to do with flying whizzbees."

  "That's right. Flying saucers are another name for Unidentified Flying Objects. Lights in the sky that people see."

  "Lights in the sky? Remo said something about lights."

  "Then he must have gotten on to something. He was supposed to infiltrate a group of UFO watchers, FOES."

  "Explain to me about these lights."

  Smith cleared his throat. "Well, for several years now, people in this country and around the world— but mostly in this country— have seen or thought they've seen peculiar objects in the sky— lights, objects, fires, etc. Most of them are ordinary phenomena like planets and aircraft, but some aren't easily explained. There's a popular theory that these UFOs are ships from other worlds, that they are the work of advanced civilizations who have been monitoring Earth for thousands of years. I find this a bit hard to swallow myself, the idea of advanced civilizations greater than our own—"

  "What is so difficult about that?" Chiun said. "I am from an advanced civilization— Korea."

  "Yes. Well, uh, Remo's job was to investigate this group to see if they had made contact with an individual calling himself the World Master, who might be influencing them to attack America's missile defense system. Most of this is contained in the files I gave Remo."

  "Then this group is responsible for what happened to my son?" Chiun said slowly.

  "Possibly. But at this point we must assume that they are probably harmless."

  "No one is harmless. Especially the foolish," Chiun said and hung up.

  Chiun went over to Remo, whom he had stripped and then washed with special ointments and laid in a bed. Chiun normally discouraged Remo from using a bed, but its soft mattress was the perfect resting place for his injured body. Bending his old head, Chiun listened to Remo's breathing. Its rhythms were returning. Good. Yes, Remo would get better. Most of it was shock, and the shock had triggered defensive sleep mechanisms.

  Chiun then retrieved the files Remo had tossed into a wastebasket, and began reading them. As he read, Chiun grew excited. His beard trembled. The more he read, the more agitated he seemed to become. His clear eyes took upon a peculiar, shocked light. Under his breath, Korean words spilled forth. Harsh words at first, then quieter ones. Words of astonishment.

  Hours later, when Chiun rose from his lotus position, his parchment face, ordinarily the color of aged ivory, was now more the color of old bone. And there was a strange expression on his face, one that would have puzzled Remo Williams had he been awake to see it. It was the expression of someone who, after a lifetime, has seen a great truth that had previously escaped him.

  It was an expression of wonder and joy and a hint of fear.

  Chiun returned to Remo's bedside and spoke softly, as if he could hear. "Why did you not tell me of this, my son? Did you not recognize this great thing for what it truly was? Foolish child, you ventured where only the reigning Master of Sinanju has the experience to go. And you have paid the price. But I will make these things right, and I will go forth for the greater glory of Sinanju. You will share in this glory, Remo, when you are well, never fear. But first you must become well. I will return for you when my pilgrimage is over. Good-bye, Remo."

  So saying, the Master of Sinanju sat down to write a note with a goose quill, which he left on the dresser beside his sleeping son, and quietly and thoughtfully left the apartment and the hotel.

  ?Chapter Seven

  Pavel Zarnitsa was not in America to spy on Americans.

  No, that was the furthest thing from his mind. Pavel Zarnitsa was in America to spy on the Russians who worked for the Soviet airline, Aeroflot. Not a
ll of them. Some were simply Russians who worked for Aeroflot, and these Russians were no problem. They were civilians.

  But some were not civilians. Some belonged to the GRU, the Glavnoe Razvedyvatelnoe Uprevlenie, or the Chief Intelligence Directorate of the Soviet General Staff. The GRU was the world's second most powerful intelligence service in the world, after the KGB, or Committee for State Security, for whom Pavel Zarnitsa worked. That the GRU was as Russian as the KGB made no difference to Pavel Zarnitsa or his superiors. The GRU was a rival to the KGB. They were competition. And they liked to use foreign branches of Aeroflot as their "fronts."

  It was ironic that it was the capitalistic idea of competition that the Kremlin used to keep the KGB and the GRU on their toes. They were given separate operating budgets but overlapping responsibilities, insuring a certain amount of rivalry and bureaucratic infighting between the two services, and virtually no sharing of intelligence. Probably the CIA knew more about GRU agents in Aeroflot than he did, thought Pavel ruefully. But he also knew that the CIA did not know the name of the one KGB agent in New York's Aeroflot office, namely himself. The KGB was subtle, despite popular depictions of its agents as thick-necked bulls in gray raincoats and fedoras. The GRU was not so subtle. Often, in fact, they were clumsy dolts. Still, they could be effective and had good men— some good men— working for them.

  Pavel Zarnitsa knew this because his brother, Chuzhoi, worked for the GRU. Chuzhoi was younger by ten years, just a boy. But an imaginative boy, Pavel knew, too imaginative for the GRU. Pavel had told him that when Chuzhoi announced his decision not to follow his older brother's footsteps. But Chuzhoi, young and brash like his dead mother, did not listen. He never listened. And so Chuzhoi had gone his way and Pavel his own.

  Pavel had seen his brother only once after that. It happened when they were accidentally seated together in a Moscow cafe, where lone diners were always seated with strangers because space was at a premium even at the worst places.

  "The stupid capitalists are doomed," Chuzhoi had announced boastfully after Pavel asked how he was doing. "Within five years we will have military parity with them, thanks to their own lax security, and then the inevitable Communist revolution will cover the globe."